Week in Pop: Future Generations, PANGS, Vritra, We Are Temporary

While the tribulations of global unrest shows no sign of finding unity & peace anywhere, Impose’s Week in Pop continues to promote togetherness, love, light & respect for all through coverage of media with meaning. With a host of talents that helped us this week make some sort of sense out of our needlessly complicated world, we give you the biggest breaking exclusives with first some of the week’s biggest buzz with news that Jay Som’s much talked about & beloved album debut Turn Into will be officially released November 18 via Polyvinyl; Danny Brown’s new album has been titledAtrocity Exhibition after the Joy Division song of the same name; Death Grips dropped the Sean Metelerkamp video for “Eh” off Bottomless Pit, & Zach Hill & Andy Morin’s side project I.L.Y’s droppedScum With Boundaries; FKA twigs taught a dance class, with word of upcoming performance-film Soundtrack 7 debuting at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on August 3; Schoolboy Q announced the “Blank Face World Tour”, & dropped the APLUSFILMZ video for “JoHn Muir”; Lil Wayne & DJ Drama dropped the Quality Street Music 2 tape today; Vic Mensa’s freestyle over Pusha T’s “Numbers on the Boards”; Kesha announced the Kesha & the Creepies Fuck the World Tour; Mykki Blanco announced the debut album Mykki will be available September 16 from !K7, & dropped “The Plug Won’t”; Jeremih dropped the Late Nights: Europe mixtape; Sprit Club (Andrew Caddick, Nathan & Joel Williams) dropped “Room to Run”; PARTYNEXTDOOR announced the new album PARTYNEXTDOOR 3 (P3), & dropped Not Nice”; De La Soul dropped “Royalty Capes” off their August 26 slated album Anonymous Nobody…; Dinosaur Jr. dropped “Solo Extractions” that features every guitar solo off their August 5 slated album Give a Glimpse of What Yer Not; White Lung dropped the John Stavas video for “Dead Weight”; Kool Keith announced the new album Feature Magnetic available September 16 from Mello Music Group, & dropped “World Wide Lamper” ft. B.a.R.S. Murre & Dirt Nasty; Merchandise announced their new album A Corpse Wired for Sound available September 23 from 4AD, & dropped “Flower of Sex”; Woodsist Festival returns to Big Sur July 26-27; Nice as Fuck supergroup played “Door” & “Guns” on Colbert; Desiigner dropped the new track “Tiimmy Turner”; Chairlift dropped “Get Real”; Avey Tare & Geologist’s “Weird ’90s Mix“; Unknown Mortal Orchestra dropped the James Lee video for “First World Problem” ft. choreography by Kianí Del Valle; Stormzy to rent an entire amusement park for this birthday; Bon Iver dropped a video titled “#22days”; The Range’s Superimposedocumentary / EP will be available August 4; Seth Bogart dropped the Tierney Finster video for “Lubed”; Yasiin Bey, fka Mos Def featured on A Tribe Called Red’s “R.E.D.” with Narcy & Black Bear off We Are The Halluci Nation available September 16 from Radicalized Records; Temple of the Dog announced their first ever tour; the Oasis reissues continue with word that their 1997 album Be Here Now will be given the Chasing the Sun Edition October 7, & the Gallaghers dropped “D’You Know What I Mean?” (NG’s [Noel Gallagher] 2016 Rethink); Haim canceled their European tour; the Yeezy & Taylor Swift chronicles continue, with no immediate end in sight; Macauley Culkin’s novelty band Pizza Underground are putting out an album; Grimes broke down “Kill V. Maim”; Sleigh Bells dropped “Hyper Dark” with word of fall tour; Marilyn Manson announced that his upcoming album SAY10 will be available Valentine’s Day, 2017; Coldplay went Back to the Future with Michael J. Fox joining the band onstage; delays in the All Eyez on Me Tupac biopic cited on account of song licensing issues; David Bowie box setWho Can I Be Now? (1974-1976) to feature the previously unreleased proto-Young Americans album—The Gouster; Joe Budden versus Drake continues; The Avalanches postponed festival dates on account of health matters; M.I.A. is now no longer headlining AFROPUNK Festival in London, & replaced by Grace Jones; A$AP Rocky shared more controversial comments; our get-well-soon wishes are with Aerosmith’s Joe Perry; and we continue to mourn the passing of Suicide’s legendary Alan Vega.

PANGS

PANGS are rapidly proving themselves to be some of the most clever pop phenomenons out there. The trio of Lindsay, Nick & Will began a more candied-out offshoot version of their beloved NUDITY band; PANGS stands for every pop single you have ever wanted to hear on the radio airwaves but never have (perhaps outside of the college/left of the dial channels at least). PANGS proved themselves with the get-go earning themselves international acclaim with the single “Already Done”, a cover of Wreckless Eric’s “Whole Wide World”, “Audio/Visual”, “Killing Kind” and now proudly present the world premiere of tied-up touch-tones and star-crossed connections with “Busy Signals”.

“Busy Signals” is the latest contribution to the great pop canon of songs made around the motif of phone tag games that go in circle like a landline serpent chasing it’s own RJ11 modular connector tail in circles. PANGS dismiss the smart phone age, but take us right before the rotary era by edifying the notes, tones, anticipation & connections made through touch tone technology. Opening with the titular tell-tale “Busy Signals” as heard on The Nerves’ classic power pop jam “Hanging on the Telephone” (later immortalized by Blondie); Lindsay, Nick & Will create a super catchy romantic ode to those special people in our lives that are on our minds of whom we desire to talk to on the telephone line. The analog phone system style employed by PANGS becomes the connective canvas that perpetuates the plot of attempting one of those miraculous emergency breakthrough maneuvers in the hopes of reconnecting with a beloved one. On “Busy Signals” both the touch-tone phone, the switchboard, and telephone wires becomes both the narrative enabler and obstacle at the same time where the very means of candid conversation is also an adversarial agent. We discussed all this and more with PANGS in an exclusive interview featured right after the following debut of “Busy Signals”.

Tell us about all the cool holidays and summer vacations that you all have been enjoying.

First time in the British West Indies last month. North Caicos is apparently what most of Caribbean was like before parrot heads or lifestyle branding nonsense. Just stunning. The islands are known for ripsaw music which is pretty upbeat and features a handsaw blade scraped with a knife or screwdriver. Our local host had mad love for Neil Diamond though.

PANGS Lindsay & Nick on holiday; press photo courtesy of the artists.

What do you all over at the PANGS / NUDITY camp lament about how we are seeing less and less touch tone phones everywhere (like fewer and fewer landlines, pay phones, etc)?

We grew up on the weird teen ceremony of calling friends or a crush on the home phone and maybe finally getting a landline in your own bedroom. It hardly seems like that was ever real. There’s no wait by the phone and hope someone calls; we’re all halfway omniscient knowing exactly where all our friends are, connected and detached all at once. There’s some good in getting lost.

What connections do you all still retain to these now antiquated analog devices?

I thought I was on the phone a lot in grade school, in my room talking about everything and nothing; little did I know how much more obsessed we would become with our phones! Everything is sophisticated now. Identities meticulously curated. It’s lovely and exhausting.

We’re ready to put out a full length record! Just cut the last song this week at Welcome to 1979 in Nashville. Mixing and cutting vinyl next. There are a couple really beautiful cinematic 1960s-style things on it that we’ve not released. If the rest of our music is bombastic and summertime, these are decidedly different: lush and autumnal. It’ll probably be a fall release too; pressing records takes awhile.

Other events & artists we need to be hipped to right now?

Kind of obsessed with Giant Claw’s remix album of Guerrilla Toss right now. It’s like Tom Tom Club candyflipping. Along the same lines are Roar from New Orleans, a two piece—drums, trombone, moog bass and badass vocals.
Nashville’s HeCta are dope.